LINGUIST List 14.1206

Tue Apr 29 2003

Books: General Ling: Bod, Hay, Jannedy (eds)

Editor for this issue: Marisa Ferrara <marisalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. dgw, Probabilistic Linguistics: Bod, Hay, Jannedy (eds)

	
Title: Probabilistic Linguistics
Series Title: Bradford Books
			
Publication Year: 2003
Publisher: MIT Press 
 http://mitpress.mit.edu/		 
			
Editor: Rens Bod
Editor: Jennifer Hay
Editor: Stefanie Jannedy 

Hardback: ISBN: 0262025361, Pages: 448, Price: $85
Paperback: ISBN: 0262523388, Pages: 448, Price: $35
			
Abstract:

For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea
that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It
has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of
representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show
probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic
linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views
knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints
but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a
statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the
endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic
approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic
linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far
with a probabilistic perspective.

This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic
approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of
probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax,
language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and
sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary
probability theory and probabilistic grammars.

Rens Bod is one of the principal architects of the Data-Oriented
Parsing (DOP) model, which provides a general framework for
probabilistic natural language processing. Jennifer Hay is Lecturer in
Linguistics at the University of Canterbury. Stefanie Jannedy works on
the development of text-to-speech systems at Lucent Technologies/Bell
Labs.

Contributors:
R. Harald Baayen, Rens Bod, Ariel Cohen, Jennifer Hay, Stefanie
Jannedy, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Manning, Norma Mendoza-Denton,
Janet Pierrehumbert, Kie Zuraw.

Lingfield(s): General Linguistics

Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)


 See this book announcement on our website: 
 http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=5978.